Chapter 300!

Believe it or not, this is my 300th blog! Those of you long time readers have manged to stick with me through 300 weeks of less than riveting material. I find this both amazing and a bit scary.

As with any children's birthday party, entertainment is the order of the day. It's just that the Book Family entertainment for Reagan's party was a bit different than most families. For everyone's enjoyment, we deployed an old airbag we had laying around. As is customary for any modern activity, we took video of the airbag launching a road cone as it is energized. Check it out.

We do have limits to our fun, at least we didn't put some poor unsuspecting schmuck atop our airbag: 

(If you can't view the video above, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-CNfi04IY )

 At work we started the week off by getting three 40' containers delivered into the shop. We have to empty the entire shop, small gas engine shop, two classrooms, office, parts room and tool room and get all the stuff put into the containers. This is all so the district can do as yet defined "system upgrades". If our new instructor didn't didn't take two weeks vacation to go through everything before we packed for the summer, we'd be in a real pickle. We've thrown 7 pickup truck loads and numerous trash cans of old stuff, parts, papers, etc., from the shop. I'm just glad we didn't have to pack/unpack all that unnecessary stuff! I found a whole case of this baking soda. It's so old it didn't even have a UPC code on it.

The second container is being delivered here. You can see the one on the left is already being loaded. They don't even look like full-sized shipping containers in the shop.

Our new instructor, Kurt, had the kids power-wash all the jacks and stands and most anything else that he could get his hands on. What a difference clean equipment makes. 

 Carissa and Chris got us a plant for hosting Reagan's birthday party. It's a beautiful color, I planted it with some silver dusty miller plant to accent the color of the beautiful leaves. As you can see, it's growing fast. 

 Fred found me a bottle of Diet Coke with my name on it! Nothing ever has my name on it. Now I don't want to drink it because I'll have to throw the bottle away.  

The crops are coming along nicely. I get one or two sugar snap peas every few days... 

...and the carrots should be ready for Reagan to harvest when she visits next. 

I saw this pretty thistle embossed on a set of encyclopedias we threw out and it reminded me of Kyanne and Ryan and our wonderful trip to Scotland.

We had an outing at Jaguar of Tacoma followed by lunch at Johnny's Dock on a Tacoma waterway. I just don't what the name of the waterway is. Anyway, we had nice views of the marina and what appears to be an Apollo space capsule that crash landed across the waterway from us. That's actually the Museum of Glass featuring the work of Dale Chihuly. 

When I went to Tri-Cities to visit Dad and Bobbie, Bobbie gave me a couple of pictures of the family Jag starring my feet. As best I could tell, this was around 1971.

 So with the above photo in mind, we recreated the same image about 40 years later. Let me tell you, it was not very comfortable laying with the console in my middle!  

Random saber-toothed tiger from Caveman Kitchen. For those of you that are famiiar with Kent, can you believe that rock shop is still there?

I love, love, love, this picture of Becky and Reagan!

Chris and Reagan having morning story time.

Eating like a big person. 

Reagan's first school picture. I know she mainly looks like Chris, but she sure has a lot of Carissa in her for this picture. 

Reagan and Dad have playtime. 

Yup, I'm cool and you'd better get used to it! 

"Uh, oh. I thought I'd get all these balls out of the bag before Mom caught me."

And Payton is growing up so fast. How cute is she in her recital tutu?